Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) (10 page)

Adam pilots us out of the tunnel. The daylight is blinding. We approach I-95 in silence. Adam shifts into fifth gear. “By the way,” he says, “I give him credit. It's a classy way out.”

“You give who credit?” I turn and look emphatically over my left shoulder at the I-95 traffic, hoping Adam will be inspired to follow my example.

Adam scoots us onto the highway two feet ahead of an eighteen-wheeler. The truck is practically on our bumper. Adam floors it. “Your date. A guy kisses you on the hand when he doesn't want to kiss you for real.” Having found a foolproof way to change the subject, he whistles contentedly. I hadn't even mentioned my evening with George. I glare at him.

“Shut up,” I say.

He does, which is unsatisfying.

“You're an utter waste of DNA.”

He tips his baseball cap.

“And how do you know so much about my date?”

“NPR. Hannah was on-air taking questions about the hand kiss.” He gives me a long, wicked smile.

“Jesus! Watch the road!”

He holds his pose another second, then slowly turns back to the windshield.

In truth we're not going fast, and now that we're ahead of the truck the highway doesn't look crowded. Still.

“I don't remember soliciting your opinion about my date,” I say to him. Adam: whose romantic résumé includes the time Kim, his college girlfriend, insisted after almost two years on knowing what he felt for her—at which point he assured her that she was
the shit
(end quote) and she broke up with him.

“You most certainly did. You asked me just after you got into the car whether there'd been any interesting women in Russia. And you were
beaming
at me.”

“I was not beaming.”

Adam reaches across my knees to the glove compartment and pulls out a pair of mirrored sunglasses, which he unfolds and settles on the bridge of his nose. “You're doing it again. I have to wear protective gear.”

The Ikea sign appears on the side of the highway ahead of us. When Adam glances my way again, I see my face in the distorted reflection of the lenses: owl-eyed, pale. Hopeful.

How are you supposed to conduct yourself when you believe you've had some kind of soul connection with a stranger, but—being a modern rather than a character in a nineteenth-century play—you still have to suffer the petty indignities of dating? Indignities about which you are, as a habit, skeptical?

“You've got my sister going to mush over this,” Adam continues. “She thinks hand kisses are the shit.”

Profoundly romantic
were Hannah's exact words.

Adam steers us down the exit ramp. “Watch what you do to pregnant ladies. All the gushiness is going to turn that fetus into a girl.” We leave the highway for a smaller road, where we sit in line at a light. Above us is an enormous billboard on which a woman's slender hand is practically dwarfed by the diamond ring it bears. “
YES,” SHE SAID, TREMBLING WITH EXCITEMENT
. The image towers over the stalled traffic: iconography of a civic religion. Below the caption someone has spray-painted
GET A LIFE
. Through the open windows, the warm gritty exhaust of a nearby truck lays siege to our car.

“So,” I venture. “You think he didn't want to kiss me? I mean—”

“Whoooooeeeee!” Adam sticks his head out the window and sends a howl to the pollution-tinged heavens. The driver inching forward past in the next lane slams her brakes and turns, with an expression of panic, to find the source of the noise. His head back inside the car, Adam grins at me. “Let me get this straight. You're actually asking
me
for advice.”

“Maybe.”

“So, what's your offer? What fabulous prizes await me if I share my brilliant—my
walk-on-water
—observations?” His expression—part wry, part barbed—defies me to compliment him again. Traffic begins to flow. He zips us forward. The car ahead of us brakes, and we lurch to a halt just in time to avoid a fender-bender.

“I don't negotiate with terrorists.”

“I'll advise you on one condition,” he says.

“Which is?”

“Quit driving.”

“What are you talking about?”

He makes a bare gesture with his knuckles toward the well where my flexed foot hovers over the floor mat. “You're braking right now. You drive even when you're not driving. If you don't stop you're going to get muscle spasms in your foot.”

“I'm not—”

“And if you keep denying it you're going to get carpal ego syndrome.”

“Look.”

He looks.

“Look,” I repeat. “It's just, maybe you could leave a little more following distance.”

He makes a face.

“For my sake. I know you're a safe driver.” I don't know that he's a safe driver but am willing to make this concession in the interest of peace.

He makes a worse face.

I flex my toes, kick off my flats, and prop a foot on the dashboard.

Adam laughs, a laugh with mercy in it. “Tracy, you want to know what I really think about the hand kiss?” He lowers the sunglasses to the tip of his nose. “If you like this guy, then you must have had, you know, connection. And you're smart enough to be able to tell when connection is two-sided.” He brings the car to another juddering halt. “So if
you
think he likes you, then he does. Now the only question is, Why no real kiss? Okay. So. Possibility numero uno: he's shy.”

I recall the paper plate on its way down to the carpet, scattering tabouli like a spinning Milky Way. “I don't think it's shyness,” I say.

“So that leaves two other possibilities. Either he's into you, but you gave him the vibe that you weren't into him. Or else the chemistry isn't there.”

“Hannah thinks it's romantic that he only kissed my hand.”

“No offense to my sister, but which of us do you think knows
guys better? I'm telling you, you'll know everything on the next date. There
is
the remote possibility he was just doing the gentleman thing for first-impression's sake. But no matter what, lips must lock by date numero two. Nerves or chivalry can muck up date one, but if there's no serious lip mosh by the second date, then forget it. Either the guy's not interested, or else he's
too
much of a gent. In which case you don't want him.”

We inch forward in traffic once more.

“You actually like this one, huh, Trace?”

I release my breath. “I think so.”

“Well, good luck.”

I look at him, silently communicating my appreciation.

With a yelp, Adam punches the sunglasses back up over his eyes. “Jesus, give me a little warning next time you're going to do that.”

Later, as an act of appreciation and charity, I dissuade Adam from buying black sheets, a black comforter, black dishes, and black plasticware, on the theory that he will not need to wash them.

George phones at five o'clock to firm up plans.

“You're sure you want to do this?” I say. “Yolanda is good, she really is. But the play itself may not be a winner. You may regret coming. Maybe we ought to hold off, and plan something else.”

“I won't prosecute if the show is a flop. Besides, I love theater. And didn't you say you're not free any other evening this week? And that your friend gave you an extra ticket?”

In fact Yolanda phoned this weekend to insist I invite
that George guy
to the opening—a gesture I found brave given her current emotional state. The thought of what George and Yolanda might make of each other, especially with Yolanda poised to vaporize all unrepentant males, makes me anxious. But I'm out of arguments. We agree that he'll come by my apartment and we'll take the subway to the theater. Remembering Adam's caution that I might have discouraged George on our first date, I hesitate before getting off the phone. “I'm looking forward to it,” I say.

There's a substantial pause before George replies. “I'll see you at seven.”
From the street comes the long honk of an irate driver. The phone line is silent. I rise and, with ripening dismay, shut my window.

“Meanwhile,” says George, “I'll phone the Canadian embassy to find out whether it's a violation of international trade laws to give my heart to an American.”

My giggle makes me sound like a fourteen-year-old.

At six-thirty I dress. The miniskirt and top are maroon and tight, a gift from Yolanda:
If you've got the body, wear the clothes. If you don't, you'll regret it when you're fifty.

I turn grimly before the mirror.

Being a proponent of difference feminism rather than equality feminism, I am not in principle alarmed by miniskirts. But I'm accustomed to seeing a scholar in the mirror, not a pair of legs. The outfit isn't me—or rather, it's more of me than I usually display. On the plus side, though, it definitely gives the vibe that I'm into the guy. I add a gauzy black scarf, which produces a more brooding, dramatic look than I'd intended; the effect, a little more Edna St. Vincent Millay than my usual, is definitely bold.

On the other hand, sexual boldness didn't exactly guarantee her happiness.

I exchange miniskirt and scarf for a pair of black pants.

If I were a postmodernist, I'd say St. Vincent Millay never had a chance at what she wanted. I'd say that all love is revisionist history. That totalitarian governments should take lessons from lovers. That I will rewrite this moment depending on the events of the future. In retrospect, it will be the moment I stood in front of the mirror and knew, despite wanting to believe otherwise, that George was a dead end, or worse, a black hole into which I'd pour months of my life. Or else I'll hail it as the moment I understood, in some indefinable way, that George was for me. Either way, though, I'd have to concede that the whole thing was a construct. Postmodernists can't believe in love. It's illegal.

As a modernist I can, technically, believe in love—but only as reconstituted from the fragments of shattered cultural ideals. Facing down the mirror, I remind myself that I was, for most of graduate school, a Romanticist, specializing in the shapely narrative, the honest hero, love as destiny. This seems to brighten my prospects
until I recall how in college I once heard my Romanticism TA, when he thought no one was listening, say to another grad student
Love is shit.

Shit.

I change into jeans. And a slightly snug blouse. The buzzer sounds. I drop my hairbrush, grab my handbag, and, flushed, stride my way through the hall and into the elevator.

At the door he kisses me. It's a soft, long kiss, and when he's finished I'm not. I slide my fingers into his fine straight hair and greet him again. New York City shrugs and looks elsewhere; on this wide concrete stoop two conspirators can query and reply secure in the knowledge that, like children with hands over our own eyes, we've stepped outside the world.

We approach the theater together on the narrow sidewalk, our shoulders occasionally brushing. Fishing the tickets from my pocketbook, I lead George toward the small marquee, brightly lit:
WHY THE FLOWER LOVES THE ROD
. Below this, in smaller letters, reads:
A PLAY OF PASSION POLITICS & POETRY.

“Thanks again for coming,” I say to George, and swing open the narrow black door.

The theater is dingy inside. George and I take our seats at the front and wait as the small capacity crowd assembles. I barely glance at the audience, aware instead of George's steady breathing, his expectant expression as he surveys the theater. The difference in our heights even seated.

The theater darkens. There is a long silence. Gradually a vibrant blue light fills the stage. Sound effects of traffic on a rainy day.

I hardly recognize Yolanda when she steps onto the stage. She's regal, worn. Tragic. She taps across the stage swiftly in low heels and a tweed skirt, stopping at its very edge. She faces the audience. Her voice is hoarse like a smoker's. “I'd been through every sort of war. The war of marriage. The war of divorce. The war of childbirth. And the war of wars. The Great War. I let life fling me. Almost break me. But I would not be broken.” She pauses to scan the audience. She sees me in the front row, and directs a slow nod my way, like a queen granting audience. “So
he
would be the one. Yes.
He
would understand. He would save me. And I would save him. But not before we'd set each other's worlds on end.” She
turns in profile. “Up the curved stone stairs to his office. There he sat, like an owl.”

Under the stage lights, Yolanda has a ravaged dignity I've never noticed. I understand now why the playwright jumped to cast her. Onstage, Yolanda's grievances are epic. Perhaps, I think, I judged this production too quickly.

A spot comes up on Freud/Bill, seated at the far right corner of the stage, also in profile. And herein lies the first problem. In reality, Freud was old enough to be Hilda Doolittle's father. By the time they met, he was battling illness and apprehensive about the mounting dangers of Nazism. But this Freud is a chisel-jawed hunk. The only concessions to historical reality are a trim snowy beard and wig that manage to look only like accessories on a remarkably pretty man.

Freud/Bill lights a cigar. The smoke he blows lingers in the stage lights.

In parallel monologues on opposite sides of the stage, Yolanda and Bill begin to speak, their lines alternating.

H.D./YOLANDA
: “I'd let a man name me once before.”

FREUD/BILL
: “Not many are able to understand the true depth of my philosophy.”

H.D./YOLANDA
: “I swore I wouldn't do it again.”

FREUD/BILL
: “When she came she was a battered psyche.”

H.D./YOLANDA
: “I was at the end of my rope. I had nowhere else to turn, nobody who understood me.”